The Joy of Pain (4 page)

A slew of utopian novels, such
Walden Two
by B. F. Skinner and
Facial Justice
by L. P. Hartley, reveal how people's common use of social comparisons challenges societal efforts to maximize happiness. But I doubt anyone has been as effective in showing the importance of social comparisons in everyday life as 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his classic work,
A Discourse on Inequality
,
⁹
Rousseau imagines what life might have been like early in human history and speculates that people may have lived in a relatively solitary state. If this were so, the implications for our sense of self and our emotional life would have been huge. Natural differences among people in intelligence and strength, often the stuff of social comparison, would have carried little weight in this “state of nature.” As long as people were smart and strong enough to procure food and shelter, they would have needed no greater talents—nor would they have felt lacking. Rousseau suggests that with greater contact among people in our more recent history, an increase in social comparisons resulted, yielding likely effects. Rousseau writes:

People become accustomed to judging different objects and to making comparisons; gradually they acquire ideas of merit and of beauty, which in turn produce feelings of preference. … Each began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself; and public esteem came to be prized. He who sang or danced the best; he who was the most handsome, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly regarded, and this was the first step toward inequality.
¹⁰

Feelings about ourselves would also change. In a solitary state, we would feel good about ourselves if we had food in our bellies, a roof over our heads, and the absence of physical injury. Not so when living among others. Now, a kind of self-pride or “
amour propre
” takes over, inspired by a newfound desire to be superior to others and to be recognized as such. Rousseau highlights the
feelings that dominate when self-feelings are powered by relative differences—shame and envy if we are inferior and vanity and scorn if we are superior.
¹¹

Psychologists, beginning with the pioneering work of Leon Festinger in the 1950s that linked social comparison with a basic drive to evaluate ourselves, have found many ways to give empirical weight to claims about the importance of social comparison in self-evaluations.
¹²
Susan Fiske, in her recent book,
Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us
, provides an excellent distillation of this research done by her and many others.
¹³
I am most fond of a study done in the late 1960s by Stan Morse and Ken Gergen.
¹⁴
The design was simple, but the implications of the findings are far reaching. Participants who were students at the University of Michigan showed up in response to an ad for a job. The job promised good pay, so the stakes were higher than for a typical experiment. On arriving, they were placed in a room and asked to fill out a questionnaire as part of the application. After the students had completed half of the questionnaire, which contained an indirect measure of self-esteem, the experimenters arranged for another apparent applicant to enter the room and also begin completing the application. The appearance and behavior of this person were adjusted to create two conditions. In the Mr. Clean condition, this person was impressively dressed, well-groomed, and self-confident. He carried with him a college philosophy text and began completing the application with efficient ease. In a contrasting, Mr. Dirty condition, this person was shabbily dressed, smelly, and seemed a little dazed. While working on his application, he would occasionally stop and scratch his head, as if he needed help.

Participants then completed the final part of the application, which contained another embedded self-esteem measure. By subtracting the participants' self-esteem scores before and after the second applicant entered the room, Morse and Gergen were able to test a number of possible predictions. One possibility was that comparing with “Mr. Clean” would decrease self-esteem, but comparing with “Mr. Dirty” would not increase it. This would suggest that an “upward” comparison typically affects self-esteem, but a “downward”
comparison does not. Superiority in others makes us feel bad, but we may be indifferent to inferiority in others. A second possibility was that Mr. Dirty would increase self-esteem, but Mr. Clean would not decrease it. This would suggest that a downward comparison can affect self-esteem, but an upward one may not. We are indifferent to superiority in others, but inferiority in others gives us a boost. A final possibility—the one that actually occurred—was that
both
conditions would affect self-esteem. Applicants felt worse about themselves when the other applicant was superior
and
better about themselves when the other applicant was inferior. Superiority in others often decreases our self-esteem, but their inferiority provides a boost, especially in competitive circumstances—as many other subsequent studies have shown since this one by Morse and Gergen.

The results were revealing in other interesting ways. A staff person rated how similar the participants were to the accomplice in terms of demeanor, grooming, and overall appearance and confidence. As illustrated in
Figure 1.1
, most of the movement in self-esteem occurred for those participants who resembled Mr. Dirty—that is, those who appeared to have “inferior” characteristics themselves. They must have felt the contrast with the superior applicant most acutely, as their reports of self-esteem, when compared to
Mr. Clean, took a big hit. But they also
benefited
most if they were lucky enough to be in the Mr. Dirty condition—comparing themselves to someone at least equally inferior appeared to give them a much-needed boost. Interestingly, participants rated as having superior characteristics were little affected by either accomplice. If anything, comparison with the superior applicant made them feel better. Perhaps the comparison confirmed their own feelings of superiority.

Figure 1.1. The association of resembling Mr. Clean or Mr. Dirty with self-esteem.
Participants resembling Mr. Dirty had lower self-esteem after comparing themselves with Mr. Clean and higher self-esteem after comparing themselves with Mr. Dirty. In contrast, participants resembling Mr. Clean had no change in self-esteem after comparing themselves with Mr. Dirty and slightly greater self-esteem after comparing themselves with Mr. Clean.

It is hard to overstate the far-reaching advantages of superiority, as well as the obvious disadvantages of inferiority. The implications for understanding many instances of
schadenfreude
are important as well. Most of us are motivated to feel good about ourselves; we look for ways to maintain a positive sense of self.
¹⁵
One reliable way to do this is to discover that we are better than others on valued attributes. When our self-esteem is shaky, comparing ourselves with someone inferior can help us feel better.

A series of studies by Dutch social psychologists Wilco van Dijk, Jaap Ouwerkerk, Yoka Wesseling, and Guido van Koningsbruggen gives strong support for this way of thinking.
¹⁶
In one study, participants read an interview with a high-achieving student who was later found to have done a poor job on her thesis. Before reading the interview, as part of what appeared to be a separate study, they also filled out a standard self-esteem scale. Participants' feelings about themselves were very much related to how much pleasure they later felt after learning about the student's failure (items such as “I couldn't resist a little smile” or “I enjoyed what happened”): the worse they felt about themselves, the more pleasing was this student's failure. The explanation for these findings was reinforced by a closer analysis using a different measure. Immediately after reading about the high-achieving student, participants indicated whether reading about the student made them feel worse about themselves by comparison. The analysis showed that the tendency for participants with low self-esteem to feel pleased over the student's poorly done thesis was linked precisely with
also
feeling that they compared poorly with this student. In other words, when the participants with low self-esteem felt
schadenfreude
, they had also felt the earlier sting of comparing poorly with the student.

A second study added further evidence. The procedure was exactly the same, except that half of the participants, immediately after reading the interview with the high-achieving student but before learning about her academic misfortune, were given a prompt to think “self-affirming” thoughts about their important values. The other half did not get this opportunity. Only this latter group showed the same pattern of reaction as in the first study. Participants in the first group, because self-affirming thoughts may have prevented the unpleasant effects of the social comparison, were less inclined to find the student's academic misfortune pleasing.

There is nothing like a little success to blunt the influence of low self-esteem. I noted earlier that Frank Sinatra had the kind of talent to flatten the hopes of other singers. But even Sinatra went through a rough period in his career, and his self-esteem was at a low ebb by the end of the 1940s. Then he got the role of Maggio in the 1953 film
From Here to Eternity
and won the Oscar for best supporting actor. His psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, watched on television as Sinatra received it, and said to his wife, “That's it, then. I won't be seeing him anymore!” And he never did. Winning the Oscar was hugely self-affirming and was the start of a lasting comeback.

A third study by the Dutch researchers (van Dijk et al.) added yet another wrinkle. The starting point of the first two studies was existing variations in self-esteem. This time, the researchers “created” variations in self-esteem by giving false performance feedback to participants and then examined how they responded to others' misfortune. Each participant performed a task described as highly linked with intellectual ability and was told that he or she scored among the worst 10 percent of the population (a control group received no feedback). Then the participant read a national magazine article that described a student who had tried to impress people at a party by renting an expensive car. But, after arriving and while trying to park the car, the student drove it into a nearby canal, causing severe damage to the car. Sure enough, participants receiving the negative feedback on intellectual ability found the misfortune more enjoyable than did those in the control condition who did not receive such feedback.
¹⁷
As the 17th-century writer François de la Rochefoucauld expressed in a maxim, “If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.”
¹⁸

Thanks to the ingenuity of these researchers, we have a store of evidence demonstrating that people who stand to gain psychologically from another person's misfortune indeed get a boost to self-esteem from comparing themselves with someone suffering a setback. People with low self-esteem and those who have experienced threat to self-esteem seem especially likely to benefit.
Schadenfreude
provides one way of spotting this process.

Evolutionary psychology highlights the important role of social comparisons in everyday life and also helps explain why inferiority in others should be pleasing. A simple fact crucial to understanding how evolution works is that people
differ
in ways that consistently matter in terms of survival and reproduction. Differences that provide advantages for survival contribute to natural selection. Much of life comes down to a competitive striving for superiority on culturally prized dimensions: to gain the status and many-splendored spoils following from such status. Superiority, literally, makes the difference. Attributes that underlie greater dominance or prestige compared to rivals allow us to rise in the pecking order and accrue benefits as a result. For these reasons alone, human beings should be highly attuned to variations in rank on any attributes that grant them advantages. And, given the huge adaptive implications of rank and status, inferiority
should
feel bad and superiority
should
feel good.
¹⁹

How much we attend to social comparisons is nowhere more obvious than in the mating game. This makes sense in evolutionary terms because reproductive advantage is the bottom line. Survival means that our genetic material survives us (in our offspring), not so much that we survive individually. Thus, we must mate—and mating with those who give our offspring adaptive superiority is the name of this competitive game.
²⁰